Tag: Mobile App Development

When designing a mobile app, a proper plan is important, a great design is essential and solid development is fundamental. But, analytics is the basics to measuring the execution and the value of the hard work put into making the app. As the smartphones continue to intrude every aspect of our lives, it is clearly understood as to why marketers and developers make an effort to measure the users’ behavior through mobile app analytics.

While the mobile application industry is new, there are a range of platforms and services striving for the honour of offering people with good app data. There are a couple of tricks that will enable developers to get the most out of mobile app analytics and hopefully will help avoid making a few mistakes that could cost them.

• Start using the app analytics way before the app comes into the market

If the developers start to think about the analytics the day the app comes into the market, they will be late. There is a lot of data that can be evaluated during the app’s alpha and beta phases that will let the developers create a more use friendly and stronger V1. One tool to achieve a data driven beta period is the test flight which enables the developers to distribute a beta and evaluate the usage to offer quick iterative cycles. Several developers get caught up with the changes in the features and designs during beta but a data driven beta period will result in a better product.

• The users will not use the app the same way the developers do

It is frustrating for the developers who carefully plan the users flow through their applications. Despite the long hours of planning, the unapologetic truth remains, users will not use the app the same way its makers imagined they would. This is why it is important to attract unbiased users to use the app. Apple enables 100 users to be authorized per each standard developer account and developers should take advantage of each of these to attain feedback from a range of test users. One tool that can enable developers to attain qualitative UI feedback is heatmaps, which is an analytical tool that enables developers to see which parts of the app users interact with while using heat maps.

• Choose KPIs that make sense to the target audience

In case people haven’t seen the message in Apple’s “there is an app for that” campaign, there are several apps for various things. Applications for publishing content, social networking, commerce and gaming, need different KPIs. For example, a content publishing app could be concerned with user retention while an ecommerce app is basically interested in purchase conversions.

There are so many smartphones present in the market today and it is said that by the end of the year, there will be approximately about 3 billion mobile apps. So, with the number of mobile apps already present, one can make proper use of them.